In Russia, Journalist = Protester

In Russia, you can’t hold a public gathering or protest without a permit. Okay, a lot of places have similar laws. I can understand this even if I don’t agree with it. But according to Vremya Novosti, the local court in Tver district in Moscow set a “precedent which threatens to turn into new accusations that the Russian government is violating civil freedoms.” Not only is holding non-permitted gatherings consider illegal, now it’s also verboten for journalists to cover them. “According to the [court’s] ruling, journalists, who enter unsanctioned protests or marches to make their reports are equated with the participants in these protests and violators of the law.” Nice.

The case involves Andrei Stenin, a photo correspondent for RIA Novosti, who was charged with participating in an “unsanctioned protest” in December in front of the Presidential Administration building. If by “participating,” you mean entering the crowd to cover it, then Stepin was participating. He was fined 500 rubles. Granted, it’s a paltry fine, about $20, or basically the cost of two mega-cappuccinos and a piece of cake at the Coffee Bean near Chistye Prudy. But the amount of the fine isn’t the issue. It’s the reason for it. Basically, the government now has the legal means to test the philosophical question: if a protest occurs and it’s not in the news, did it really occur? This is one more verification that the powers that be are the true postmodernists.

But not to worry. In a statement, Vladimir Kolonoltsev, the head of the Moscow branch of the Internal Affairs, said “for law-abiding citizens, who participate in protests, officials of the city police always closely follow and act strictly in accordance with the law.”

Really!? Tell that to Artem Buzenkov a blind kid who found himself treated in “strict accordance with the law.”

However, yesterday’s ruling of the lower court became a precedent only in relation to journalists. But in recent history there are known cases when the police acted far from “carefully following the law” with those citizens who by chance find themselves in an unsanctioned civil action. For example, as Vremya Novostireported, in December 2008 Artem Buzenkov, a blind student from Podmoskovya came to the capital to go to the theater and exiting onto Triumfal square next to the metro station Mayakovskii found himself in a “Dissident’s March,” which OMON officers actively dispersed. The unsuspecting blind student fell into their earnest hand. He was convicted of participating in an unsanctioned protest and fined 500 rubles. True, the city court interfered and completely exonerated the blind student who didn’t accept his fate and sought the restoration of his good name.

Time will tell if Russian journalists will be so lucky. I suggest they add a white cane to their repertoire.

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On Tuesday, it looked as if the Anna Politkovskaya trial would be open to journalists. Today, the judge Yevgeny Zubov, decided at the last moment that it would be closed. The reason he gave was that the jury refused to participate if the trial was open to the media. Zubkov had already warned that he would close the proceedings if “a juror made a single request.”

Nevertheless, there are those that smell something rotten in the Moscow Military District Court. Karinna Moskalenko, the non-poisoned lawyer for the Politikovskaya family, was disappointed, but not surprised. Is anyone? He says that the Zubkov had “not offered convincing evidence of the need to bar the public for the safety of the jury.” “I could expect this is there were a threat to the jury,” she told reporters. Novaya gazetanoted that,

It’s notable that a day earlier when the jurors were sworn in, not a single one spoke out about their safety or suspicions regarding concern for future pressure or threats. Moreover, none of the 12 jurors said anything about having facts on that nature.

The procecution deined that the closing of the court had anything to do with government pressure from above. After all, its representatives, Vera Pashkovskaya and Iuliia Safina were all prepared to address the media, which had been assembled for a press conference a mere forty minutes before the trial opened.

So who knows? The truth of the matter is that some will believe that someone above intervened, others will say that there is a real possibility that jurors could be threatened. Both are possible, though I have the say the latter is more probable given the nature of the case and the type of people involved. The funny thing is that the same people who think there is a government hand in the court’s closing are the very same people who would blame the government if a juror was threatened, or worse, ended up dead. Either way, a conspiracy will be conjured. Given this and the amount of international attention this case is getting, if I was Zubkov I would probably play it safe too.

The Politkovskaya trial is not the only incident hitting the Russian media world. This week, Moscow prosecutors sent a warning to Newsweek Russia over the possibility that its September 29-October 5 issue might incite interethnic and religious strife between Christians and Muslims. The articles is question are “Who Goes to Mosque with Us” and “Mosque Carriers.” The complaint was filed by the Russian Mufti Council because the issue contained a reprint of the cartoon of Mohammed which sparked proetsts in 2005.
One wouldn’t think that ethnic strife is a real problem given the results of Levada Center’s recent poll on multi-ethnic tension in Russia. According to its findings, 26 perecent rarely and 58 percent never feel any ethnic hostility woward others. Similar percentages were given for the question: Do you at the present moment feel any hostility toward people of a different nationality?”
Still, the visage of the Prophet Mohammad is not the only thing the Russian media has to be careful reporting about. Apparently, so is the economic crisis. In Sverdlovsk, the prosecutor began a check of their local media for disseminating information that might “destabilize the [economic] situation in the region.” Namely, according to Timma Bobina, the head assistant to the prosecutors office, “We were assigned to check information about media attacks via the Internet on credit organizations in Yekaterinburg. If we establish evidence that the law was broken, we can follow up with disciplinary measures, and even criminal punishment against the perpetrators.”

Sverdlovsk isn’t the only region going through such a “check.” Kommersant reports that all of Russia’s regions will look into how local media is reporting on local banks. According to prosecutors, customers in the Far East received an SMS saying that Dalkombank and Vladivostok banks were going bankrupt. In three days, clients withdrew $2.4 million rubles. In Yekaterinburg local media started a panic when it reported that Severnaya Bank, Bank 24.ru, and Ural Bank were to undergo “reconstruction and development.” Apparently the economic crisis has sent many Russians into a panic to withdrawal their savings from banks.

Something must be up because there has been a rash of muggings of people carrying large sums of cash in Moscow. The Moscow Timesreports,

City police on Tuesday alone registered four separate thefts from car drivers of amounts ranging from 300,000 rubles ($10,900) to 3 million rubles ($109,000), state-run Vesti-24 said in a report posted on its web site.

“Police have noted that since the start of the crisis, such crimes have become more common,” Vesti-24 reported. “This is because people are carrying large amounts of cash. Criminals are taking advantage of this.”

Four people attacked the driver of a Jeep Grand Cherokee that had stopped at a traffic light at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday on Aviamotornaya Ulitsa in southeastern Moscow, injuring him with a hammer and baseball bats before taking a bag containing 300,000 rubles, police said.

At about the same time, three men grabbed a bag with 3 million rubles in it from a 32-year-old sitting in a car on Denisovsky Pereulok, near Baumanskaya metro station in central Moscow, before making off in a getaway car, according to police.

On Tuesday evening, three men stopped a car on Slavyansky Bulvar in central Moscow and snatched a bag containing 500,000 rubles from the 45-year-old driver.

Finally, the near death beating of Mikhail Beketov is hitting the international press, as it well should. Provincial reporters bear the brunt of the violence against journalists in Russia. They’re easy targets because they have few resources, little notoriety, and most importantly, less of an international spotlight. A glance at the Defense of Glasnost’s list of attacks on and killings of Russian journalists shows that the vast majority occur in the provinces.

Beketov has had his legs amputated and now lies in a coma with peices of his skull stuck in his brain. According to a friends Beketov had been recieving threats weeks before his beating. “He told us about a week before he was attacked that he had been informed that an order to kill him had been taken out,” says Lyudmila Fedotova, a close friend. The hospital doesn’t seem to be a safe place for him either. Fedotova also said that despite being in a coma, “he was receiving telephone threats even as he was being operated on.” Callers promised that they would eventually kill Beketov.

If there is anything good out of this, it’s that the brutal attack on Beketov has woken up the Public Chamber. In response to the attack, the body plans to create a center for the defense of journalists. Whether this will actually do anything to protect journalsists or even raise Russia’s low standing among international organizations that monitor media freedom remains to be seen. Given the lackadaisical manner the Russian government tends to have toward violence against journalists, we should be happy that at least this time they took some notice, and perhaps even some action.

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If Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin’s warning last week that Russia’s recent economic bump will most likely be short lived got you down, don’t fret there are some economic spheres besides McDonald’s that are going strong. As Timereports, leech farming is a “flourishing industry” and “a bright spot in a Russian economy.” That’s right, leeches. Not the oligarch kind that sucks wealth like a like a crack addict hits the pipe. The slimy, waterborne, blood sucking kind, or as known by its Latin moniker, Hirudo medicinalis.

Russia is leech producing central, churning out 10 times more blood suckers that any other country. The base of operations is the International Medical Leech Center at Udelnaya, southeast of Moscow. The Institute has a long history. Beginning in 1937, Udelnaya was the center of Soviet leech production. It’s unknown what their production quota was in Stalin’s Third Five Year Plan (1938-1941), but the Center produced about 3 million leeches a year. The number is evidence of how widespread leeches were used in Soviet medicine. Every Soviet pharmacy was required to carry a stock of at least 25.

The use of leeches continues to be a sound medical practice. According to Time,

[The Center] is now taking advantage of the growing popularity of leech therapy, also known as Hirudotherapy, around the world. Demi Moore last year spoke about the cleansing effects of leeches; Britain’s National Health Service buys 50,000 bloodsuckers every year; the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved leech therapy in 2004 because they proved beneficial in increasing blood circulation for patients who have had skin grafts.

Today the center sells the leeches to plastic surgeons, who put them on wounds to reduce the chance of scarring, to dentists, who apply them on gums to reduce swelling, and even to gynecologists, who use them to treat sexually transmitted diseases (Yes. You imagine right.). The oral cavity of the leech is rich with an anticoagulant, which allows the animal to feed continuously on blood but which also delivers the anti-clotting substance more effectively to the area of a wound than would a small injection puncture. Indeed, leeches are used very much like syringes. After a leech is used on a patient it has to be killed. “It’s like a disposable syringe, it isn’t good sanitary practice to use it twice,” says Gennady Nikonov the director of the Leech Center.

Perhaps strangest of all are the emotional relationships technicians at the Leech Center have formed with their leeches. Their jars require constant cleaning because, as Elena Titova, a 25 year veteran at the Center, explains, “Leeches urinate non-stop for three days after they are fed. You have to clean their jars very frequently during this time; otherwise they poison themselves with their own waste.” The staff feeds its stock “certified cattle blood” except on holidays when they treat the leeches to veal blood “as a treat.” According to Nikonov, raising leeches has a gender component. Women are more nurturing than men, and since each employee is responsible for their own crop, some organize their vacations around feeding so no one fiddles with their leeches. “Leeches are very attached to their owners,” Titova believes.

Besides their use in surgeries and other procedures, leeches are also the central ingredient of Nikonov’s skin care line, Bio Energy:

Some of the leeches go into Nikonov’s own skin care range “Bio Energy,” which is made at the Center. The most expensive product, an anti-aging cream, contains dried, freshly-hatched larvae and retails for 47,000 rubles ($1,300) for 15 grams. The idea for the cosmetic range came after the collapse of Communism, when pharmacies were no longer required to sell leeches. “We had no money and the staff would go several months without wages,” says Nikonov. “We had too many leeches and we wanted to try and create something exciting and profitable.” Nikonov explains that the deconstructed leeches become ingredients in a cream, helping it the skin’s surface to improve circulation of oxygen, fats and protein. All this, he claims, leads to younger looking skin.

The biggest export market for the Center’s leeches is France. Nikonov, however, says that he remains very selective about his clientele. “We are careful about who we export them to,” he says. “I know in certain cuisines people put the leech on a goose. They wait until it gets fat on the goose blood and then fry the leech like it’s a sausage. This is considered a delicacy. I feel sorry for the leech. They should not be used this way.”

Okay . . . I guess it works if you work it.

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I wrote an article for OpenDemocracy on microloans and debt collector violence. I’ve been mulling the article since January when I read a gruesome story about a debt collector throwing a Molotov cocktail through the debtor’s window severely burning his two year old grandson. A Google news search revealed that though this incident was one of the most tragic, it was hardly exceptional. But the idea sat and so did the saved links.

Then two things happened.

First, was all of the reporting on Putin’s alleged connections to $2 billion in the Panama Papers. Many Western reporters were bemoaning the fact that the Russian federal media wasn’t covering the story and how the details in the Papers revealed the nature of corruption and power in Russia. As usual, Mark Galeotti provided one of the more cogent comments. But besides Mark’s intervention, most commentary read as recycled verbiage salted and peppered with new flashy metaphors.

Second, on April 5, another story sprang up in the Russian press. In the town of Iskitim in Novosibirsk oblast, four masked debt collectors broke into the home of Natalia Gorbunova, beat her husband and 17-year-old son, and then raped her in front of them. Gorbunova had taken a 5,000 ruble microloan in 2014 and now the collectors were demanding 240,000.

It was the contrast between the global media outcry and analytical mummery about Putin’s alleged billions and the complete silence about what ordinary Russians like Gorbunova have to deal with. But this is always the case. Stories about the Gorbunova’s of the Russia are few and far between. It’s easier to obsess over Putin than to illuminate the complexities of Russian daily life.

I hope that my OpenDemocracyarticle is a modest contribution to the latter.